Arts-based research workshop on response art
Εlisabeth Ioannides (MA, BAAT, EFAT, CATA, EAP, ICOM, AICA)
Athens, Greece
Elisabeth Ioannides is an education curator and art psychotherapist at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST). Her interests lie in the promotion and application of learning, health, and wellbeing initiatives in museums and galleries. As an education curator, she carries out the learning programs for primary education schools. Additionally she facilitates programs for children and adults inside and outside the museum, and designs the learning materials that accompany exhibitions. Since 2017, in collaboration with Ms. Aphrodite Pantagoutsou, she has been teaching at the EMST Art Psychotherapy program, "Exploring the Museum's Images - Exploring My Image". Her research focuses on the contribution of the museum environment to art psychotherapy. You can find her articles on academia.edu. In 2021, she was a nominee for the Greek International Women’s Awards in the field of Arts and Culture.
Maria Konti (MFA, EAP, EFAT)
Athens, Greece
Maria Konti is a practising artist and art psychotherapist. She is also an IB Diploma Visual Art Teacher and senior examiner for the International Baccalaurate for Visual Arts. Her artistic work is characterized by performative texts, drawing, and model constructions based on archive practice. Her stories are weaved with features of magic realism and autobiography around gender approach and feminist perspective. She has published two books, “Nine” (2010) and “Not” (2013). As an art psychotherapist, she works primarily with adolesents in a clinical and private pratice. In collaboration with the School of Fine Art of Athens, she has also introduced an “Art as Therapy” programme for the junior high school where she is currently working. Besides her private practice, she is a colleague in the Day-Clinic in the Psychiatric Department of Adolescent and Young Adults in the General Hospital of G.Gennimatas in Athens.
The National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens | EMΣT is the sole public institution in Greece constantly supporting art psychotherapeutic practice. With its group art psychotherapy program “Exploring the Museum’s Images – Exploring my Image” that started in 2017, it has been a pioneer in bringing art psychotherapy within the museum field.
A different kind of program took place from October 2021 until June 2022. This time EMΣT hosted an art-based research art psychotherapy workshop, which was addressed to professional art psychotherapists. The workshop was designed and implemented by artist and art psychotherapist Maria Konti. Konti invited seven contemporary Greek artists and art theorists to give presentations on their own practice and collaborate with a group of participating art psychotherapists.
“Similarly, for art psychotherapists, archives open up a productive space in which history, memory, trauma, and information are connected. Through their processing and the connection of the past with the present, they can constitute vehicles for restorative experiences.”
Important theories and approaches of art psychotherapy were examined, taking as the main theoretical axis the methodological tools of contemporary artistic practice. The workshop investigated the clinical practice of response art of art psychotherapy in relation to the artistic practice of the archive.
One of the invited speakers, art theorist and independent exhibition curator Elpida Karaba writes that “in its various versions, artistic engagement with the archive, archive and memory, archive and public information, archive and trauma, (…) archive and identity, archive and time – establishes a new artistic medium” (2011). Similarly, for art psychotherapists, archives open up a productive space in which history, memory, trauma, and information are connected. Through their processing and the connection of the past with the present, they can constitute vehicles for restorative experiences. Artist Panos Kouros, another guest speaker, proposes the archive “as a wider cultural approach that has the intention of intervention and empowerment” (2012, p. 27).
The workshop enriched the research οn response art with the art-based method of artistic practice of the archive. It aimed through the active and creative participation of the members to highlight the importance of the adoption of an artistic practice, namely that of archival collection and recording. This practice aims to enrich the work of the art psychotherapist on three levels:
strengthen his/her identity as an artist
study and consolidate art-based research in art psychotherapy with the application of contemporary art methods
recognize the influence and effect of the wider context in which the session takes place
“Response art functions as the intermediate space where the art psychotherapist’s personal experience meets something else.”
Τhrough the supervision offered by the archive, the art psychotherapist has the possibility to recognize a part of the other to which they cannot have access to by the artwork produced in a single session. Response art functions as the intermediate space where the art psychotherapist’s personal experience meets something else.
The participants were invited in this workshop to answer/explore/wonder particularly on this “something else”: through a case study, their own experience, and the experience gained in the workshop, they were invited to ponder on how they connect response art to their practice as art psychotherapists.
The first cycle was completed by noting three important discussion points:
Art Psychotherapist: The first conclusion concerns the importance of cultivating the creative identity of the art psychotherapist which gives prominence to a specific artistic quality. The path, the course, the journey. Meaning that the ability of the art psychotherapist to sublimate is located in his/her conscious position within a specific journey.
Artwork: As Freud (2022) notes, documenting mediums such as the camera or the gramophone “constitute a sublimation of an immaterial innate capacity of man into a material one – his/her capacity to remember, his/her memory" (p.77). In contemporary culture, the objects that we use to document memory, sounds, images, moments, etc., become sublimatory. In that respect, we can conclude that response art functions as a sublimatory object since through it the art psychotherapist documents what happens in the session. Moreover, when a patient concludes their therapy, the response art that has been created becomes a valuable archive for psychotherapists.
Group: This archive becomes valuable when presented within a creative working group. Studying the response artworks but also studying the process itself, the ability to "respond" showcases its importance within a working group. In this case, the creative research process, which on a linguistic level is distinguished by a shift from "response art" to "the art of response", seems to empower, "weave" and create links and therefore possibilities of contribution to the public sphere.
A publication presenting the thoughts/ideas/comments/artworks and research findings is going to come out by the end of 2022.
Following the success of this pilot scientific workshop, a second cycle is designed and going to be realized by Maria Konti from October 2022 until June 2023. In the new cycle, titled “Entering Forest”, ways of recording both critical and experiential reflection will be explored. Two practices are going to be studied in connection to the clinical tool of response art in art psychotherapy:
Performative writing: “… Performative writing is an attempt to find a form for ‘what philosophy wishes all the same to say’. Rather than describing the performance event in ‘direct signification’ a task I believe to be impossible and not terrifically interesting, I want this writing to enact the affective force of the performance event again…” (Phelan, 1997, p. 11-12)
and
Autoethnography: Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to systematically describe and analyze (graphic) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno) (Ellis, 2004; Holman Jones, 2005). This approach challenges typical ways of researching and representing others and treats research as a political, socially just, and socially conscious act (Adams & Holman Jones, 2008). A researcher uses principles of autobiography and ethnography to do and write autoethnography.
For further information you can visit the research page on the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens website.
References
Adams, Tony E. & Holman Jones, Stacy (2008). Autoethnography is queer. In Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln & Linda T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies. (pp. 373-390). Sage.
Ellis, Carolyn (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. AltaMira Press.
Freud, S. (2022), Civilization and its discontents. Polytropon (Greek version).
Karaba, E. (2011). Archival art from the 20th to the 21st century: From the art of institutional critique to a radical institutionalizing practice. Doctoral thesis, University of Patras, Department of Architectural Engineering. Available on the website: https://nemertes.library.upatras.gr/jspui/bitstream/10889/5665/1/Nimertis_Karampa%28arch%29.pdf
Kouros, P. (2012). The public art of performative archiving. In Karaba, E., Kouros, P. & Kopsida, E. (Eds.) Archive public,pPerforming archives in public art yopical interpositions. Cube Art Editions.
Phelan, P. (1997). Mourning sex. Routledge.